That Brun ended up in San Antonio after years as an Air Force rolling stone is amazing enough. That he formed the Latin Playerz little more than a year after hitting town in October 1988 and kept them working for 20 years qualifies as miraculous.

“What blows my mind away is how time creeps up,” said Brun about his music career and passion for Afro-Carribean jazz.

Brun, 50, who achieved the rank of staff sergeant in his 11-year Air Force career, credits the military for his college education and seeing the country.

The New York native spent the first nine years of his life in the Bronx, living near the intersection of 143rd Street and Willis Avenue. The next nine were spent in Puerto Rico after his parents returned there with their two children in 1968.

“It was really wonderful because it gave me a full, rounded perception of Latin music,” Brun said. “We moved out of a musical neighborhood into another musical neighborhood. There was music all over the place.”

In Ponce, he once lived across the street from the popularorquesta Mingo & His Whoopee Kids.

“No matter where you looked, the music was there,” he said. The teenager became a professional musician and was soon making $65 a night.

By 1979, Brun “wanted to experience different things.” He enlisted, did basic training in S.A. and played in the Air Force Band when he wasn't repairing hydraulic flight simulators on the graveyard shift.

His military career took him to North Carolina, Illinois, Oklahoma and Texas. A marriage proved short-lived. By the time he returned to San Antonio, he was a human resources specialist and single.

“I saw the light,” Brun said. “Office life was much better.”

He says that experience gave him the skills and discipline to be a bandleader.

“I don't think we would've been together for 20 years if it wasn't for that discipline,” Brun said. “The Air Force provides you with all the tools to be a leader if you want to be one. I run the band like a business.”

Saturday's rare concert setting celebrates the release of the Latin Playerz new album, “20th Anniversary” and Brun said the group will play never-heard rap-conjunto-salsa songs from the band's 2004 three-part suite “Gente Del Rio.”

“This will be a treat,” Brun said. “Some of these songs we've never played live.”